Motorola announced three new exclusive phones for Verizon Wireless today. The Droid Ultra, Droid Mini, and Droid Maxx wrap the current version of Android in slim Kevlar, adding a mix of Verizon and Motorola features to ice the cake.

The three phones have a lot in common: they're all unibody, made of very smooth Kevlar with shiny, visually textured backs that tend to get fingerprinty, and ridged power and volume buttons on the side. (The SIM card slot is actually in the volume rocker.) They all have 10-megapixel cameras on the back and 2-megapixel shooters on the front. The batteries are sealed in, and there are no memory card slots. They'll all come in black and a deep Verizon red, and they all have 720p displays; the Ultra and Maxx have 5-inch Super AMOLED HD displays, while the Mini has a 4.3-inch TFT LCD.

The Mini is a tight little device. If I was personally with Verizon, I'd definitely consider it as my actual phone. All three phones are very well-built, with an elegant, solid look to them.

What Is The X8 Chipset? The phones run on Motorola's "X8" chipset, which is mostly a rebranded dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro running at 1.73-GHz with Adreno 320 graphics. Motorola's secret sauce may be the two additional chips the company has been promoting, which handle "contextual computing" and voice processing. I ran the Antutu benchmark and got 18573, if you're curious.

"It's really a system architecture rather than developing the ASIC," Motorola product manager Jeff Snow said.

According to Snow, the voice processing DSP allows the phone to recognize voices even when apparently turned off; you can wake up Google Now by hollering at it without waking up the phone by hand first. The contextual computing chip, meanwhile, seems to function as a very low-power, off-duty CPU, doing things like maintaining time and status information on the screen without involving the more power-hungry main processors.

This isn't "stock Android." There are tiers of Motorola and Verizon features here. Motorola adds an ability to launch the camera from standby mode by wobbling the phone in midair, something it calls Quick Capture. There's also an always-listening Google Now mode, where Now can respond even if the phone is apparently asleep, and something Motorola calls "Active Display," which wakes up only a small part of an AMOLED screen to show status information, to save battery.

Motorola Assist, meanwhile, is Motorola's new version of Smart Actions, which sets your phone into various modes when you're driving, in a meeting or asleep, for instance. The most intriguing thing about Assist, actually, is that it uses the same fonts and visual design as Google Now, making it look like a core Android feature.

Exclusive to Verizon are Droid Zap and Droid Command Center. Droid Zap is a slightly oddball photo-sharing app which lets you toss photos up into a geotagged, temporary cloud, which other people with the Droid Zap app within 300 feet will be able to download. It isn't peer-to-peer, but it kind of makes you think it is. Droid Command Center is a bubbly little home-screen weather, time and battery widget.

The new Droids also come with the Ingress augmented-reality game preloaded, and each Droid buyer gets five Ingress invites to distribute to friends.

Oh, and by the way: the phones don't default to screaming "DROID" at you as the notification sound. The default ringtone does say "Droid," but at the end of the ring.

Droids vs. Droids vs. Moto X The big difference between these phones is in size, battery life and price. The $99 Droid Mini fits very securely into even the smallest hands. It's a little bit thicker than the Ultra 8.9mm, and has the lowest-capacity battery at 2000mAh, but I think that will balance out with the lower power draw of a 4.3-inch as opposed to a 5-inch screen.

The $199 Droid Ultra and the $299 Droid Maxx are the same phone with different batteries and memory capacities. The Ultra uses a 2130mAh battery to keep its 7.2mm slimness and packs 16GB of storage, while the Maxx packs in a huge 3500mAh battery, which Motorola says will run the phone for a full 48 hours, and 32GB. At 8.5mm, it still feels extremely slim.

The Droid launch is just the beginning of Motorola's summer assault. Tomorrow, we'll hear from Motorola's parent company Google about Android 4.3, and on August 1, we'll see Motorola's flagship Moto X phone. When I asked Motorola reps about whether these Droids meant the X wouldn't be coming to Verizon, they demurred.

We did get a few hints about the X, though. It's likely to use this X8 chipset, and it'll probably have the Motorola features which we heard about here: touchless control, active display, quick camera launch, the new camera app and probably Motorola Assist. We'll have to wait for next week to learn more.

The three new Droids are available for pre-order now, and they'll hit shelves on August 20.

About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than ... See Full Bio

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